~ J. Andrews: Memoir and Ruminations

No Answers, Only the Night.

here, a long night greying to dawn. here, a host of new reasons to curse the darkness, to rail against God, to dispute the existence of anything benevolent in the Universe, to doubt that anyone can be trusted.

an hour from here, families are in tatters, weeping the night long. There will be many such nights.

Like electrical circuitry, the news spread, Twitter caught fire. Anderson Cooper jumped a jet for Colorado. So did Don Lemon.

So did frantic brothers and sisters, fathers, mothers, friends.

A pathetic wretch of a man with garish red hair taken into custody. Why wasn’t he taken out?

Why aren’t we spared the airing of his soporific idiot’s– Joker’s–face, this punk dropping out of a Ph.D. program at CU Neurosciences, this piece of human shit.

Why didn’t he put the gun in his own mouth.

Anderson Cooper tonight railed against giving the guy any airtime, letting him have the notoriety he seemed so desperate for as he walked in black through Theatre 9 in the movie plex, on his killing spree.

In the middle of summer, the great American convention of taking in a midnight movie, turned into a killing field.

I wager that all of us know what rage is– all of us have had our moments of feeling out of control, owned by anger, driven to do things we wouldn’t do, sometimes awful things, words, names called, objects thrown across a room.

But not everyone dresses up in black, loading three guns, booby trapping an apartment complex to rain down terror, murder, hell, on complete strangers– or anyone else.

I hope that this man hangs himself in his cell. I hope that something happens to him in prison so that he knows what anguish is. To bloody hell with forgiveness.

For some of us, the evidence against any sort of supreme and benign power mounts every time something like this happens.

For others, that more people didn’t die is a miracle and “God” is thanked, petitioned, begged for answers.

There aren’t any. Except that when it comes down to it, we humans can morph back into predatory saber-toothed tigers, devoid of conscience, all about survival. What do we have to do to stay alive. Whatever it is, it’s game on.

I sincerely hope that if I were ever triggered by some perceived slight, or if in reliving my own woundings at the heart of my PTSD, I became homicidal, I would have the balls to put the gun in my own mouth first, before I inflicted my misery on an already relentlessly suffering world.